Melvin L. Rogers

Melvin L. Rogers is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brown University and an award-winning scholar of American and African American political thought. His work reconstructs how major figures in the American tradition have understood the ethical and cultural conditions that sustain democratic life, with particular attention to the problem of racial injustice and the demands it places on citizens’ character and judgment. Through engagements with Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin, he examines how thinkers have grappled with enduring questions about the relationship between freedom and domination, the formation of civic sensibilities, and the role of moral and spiritual ideals in democratic politics.

Rogers is the author of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023) and The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008), and is coeditor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and editor of John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (Ohio University Press, 2016).

Rogers’s project, “Beyond Nostalgia and Despair: Storytelling and Polarization in American Democracy,” examines how the stories citizens inherit and retell about the nation shape civic orientation, moral identity, and the attachments that sustain polarization. By identifying four recurring narrative forms in American political culture — the sacral, redemptive, pessimistic, and perfectionist — he clarifies how inherited stories about belonging, betrayal, and possibility structure citizens’ sense of who counts as a partner in democratic life, while recovering a tradition of reflection that frames democracy as a faith in the capacity for mutual transformation.

May 2026